JF Ptak Science Books Post 778 Blog Bookstore
Is this an image of a librarian carefully reaching for a carefully
placed book, carefully arranged in a carefully-odd Borgesian-style library
housing only books of the same height and thickness? Or is this a librarian in a Library of the
Same Book, housing thousands of copies of copies of the same book, climbing the
ladder to make sure that he had a copy of just the copy that was requested (“a
copy held at least 5 feet from the ground, near a side window though not
touching a vertical piece of wood”)?
Neither. These are
shelves filled with nothing but uncut sheets of playing cards, housed for the
playing card factory somewhere in Paris (?) “during the reign of Louis XIV”. Playing cards, which were introduced to
Europe via Marco Polo from China
or traders coming from the Middle East or etc., are much older in Europe
this print was made, playing cards were already quite popular there for two
centuries.
I can’t identify all of the activities of all of the twelve
tables of card preparation here, though some seem pretty obvious: the trimmer working near the pressman, the
sorters and assemblers of decks of cards at the lower left corner, the paper
preparer (?) just to the right of the man on the ladder, the pair of men
preparing the type trays at middle-bottom, and that’s about it. I’m not sure what everyone else was
doing. I’m not even so sure what’s going
on with the sheets of cards on the bookshelves, the target of this post—it can’t
be for drying purposes, as the sheets are too close together…perhaps it is just
for storage of different sheets of cards for different decks.
In any event I’m right or I’m wrong on this guess, about the same odds as being dealt “nothing” in a game of five-card poker (almost 1:1 odds), but that’s fine: I just like the composition of the print.
